Faculty Awareness Bulletin

The Yale Law Journal Pocket Part has issued a call for 1,500-word essays and commentaries in two areas with tax angles: Sovereign Wealth Funds (June 27, 2008 submission deadline) & Virtual Worlds (August 25, 2008 submission deadline).  For more details, go here. 

Topics: Tax Law; Calls for Papers

St. Louis University School of Law’s Center for Health Law Studies has announced a call for papers for its 2008 Health Law Scholars Workshop.  Submission deadline is May 2, 2008.  For more details, go here & here.

Topics: Health Law; Calls for Papers

The 15th Annual Education Law Conference will be held in Portland, Maine from July 28-31, 2008.  For more details, go here.

Topics: Education Law

Take a look at this series of videos  and see eight of the nine justices speaking passionately, sarcastically & angrily into the camera as they answer questions about brief writing, oral advocacy and their own love-hate relationships with the written word.  For more detials, read this article.

Topics: Constitutional Law

The topic for the 2009 Duke Law Journal  symposium will be: administrative law under the George W. Bush administration and the future of administrative law.  The symposium expects to include general articles about the larger themes and trends in administrative law as well as articles focusing on specific administrative law fields.  For more details go here or contact the Duke Law Journal Symposium Editor, Elissa Flynn, at Elissa.Flynn[at]law.duke.edu or the Duke Law Journal Editor-in-Chief, Jeff Chemerinsky, at Jeffrey.Chemerinsky[at]law.duke.edu.

 Topics: Administrative Law; Calls for Papers

The Green Bag will launch a new ranking this spring called the Deadwood Report.  This annual report will assess “whether faculty members do the work that the law schools say they do.”  The editors explained that law schools “generally hold themselves out as institutions led by faculties whose members are committed to teaching, scholarship, and service….The Deadwood Report will simply test the accuracy of that picture.”    For many more details, including methodology and reaction from law school officials, read this article from Inside Higher Education & this SSRN article.

Topics: Law School Rankings; Legal Education

According to a recent ABA Journal article, “nationwide enrollment of African-American and Mexican-American students in U.S. law schools is down significantly since 1992 and could drop further.”  The article cites statistics gathered by folks at Columbia Law School and the Society of American Law Teachers.   According to Vernellia Randall, a professor at the University of Dayton School of Law in Ohio,  “it’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.”  Randall has put together a report entitled America’s Whitest Law Schools. 

Topics: Legal Education

Take a look at this interesting article that was written by J. Robert Brown at The University of Denver Sturm College of Law: Of Empires, Independents, and Captives: Law Blogging, Law Scholarship, and Law School Rankings.

Abstract: Law faculty blogs have been around for much of the new millennium. This article examines these blogs, including their role in the legal scholarship continuum and their growing influence of legal community. The paper begins with an evolutionary study, noting that law blogging originally began in a state of nature, with few rules governing frequency or content of posts. Increased competition and the emergence of Empire and Captive law blogs, however, has resulted in a growing sense of order on the legal blogosphere. Perhaps as a result, the influence of law blogs has increased. The paper relies on a list of approximately 130 law faculty blogs and studies the frequency of law review and case citations. The numbers have been undergoing significant growth. The growth is particularly noteworthy given the difficulty in searching for material posted on the Internet.

Topics: Law School Rankings; Legal Education

The Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) will be holding their next conference entitled “Teaching for Social Change” on Mar. 14th & 15th.   The conference will be hosted by the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California at Berkeley.  For more details, go here.   

Topics: Conferences & Symposia

Andrea A. Curcio, Gregory Todd Jones, Tanya M. Washington, Law School and Bar Examination Performance: Developing an Empirical Model to Test Whether Required Writing Exercises or Other Changes in Large-Section Law Class Teaching Methodologies Result in Improved Exam Performance, 57 J. Legal Educ. 195 (2007)

Topics: Legal Education